Today's track: In Memory Of A Honey Bee — Felix Rösch, mondëna quartet, Matija Strniša

I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually sit with it for a second.

When's the last time you created something?

Not consumed. Not scrolled. Not binged a podcast or watched someone else's highlight reel. When's the last time you sat down and made something that didn't exist before you showed up?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

We're all so busy digesting other people's creations that we don't give ourselves time to sit with ourselves and create. We don't get bored anymore. And that's a problem — because boredom is where the good stuff lives.

Think about it. Every free second gets filled. Waiting in line? Phone. Eating lunch? Scroll. Can't sleep? Netflix. We've completely eliminated the white space in our lives. The silence. The nothing.

And in doing that, we've eliminated the conditions where creativity actually happens.

Someone sent me an episode of The Telepathy Tapes — a podcast. Season 2, Episode 3: "The Consciousness of Creativity: Are Ideas Alive and Do They Choose Us?"

That title alone made me stop scrolling.

The episode talks about how creativity doesn't come from us — it comes to us. That ideas are almost like living things, knocking on doors, looking for someone willing to do the work of bringing them into the world. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this. Rick Rubin describes artists as "antennas" — tuned into some universal current, catching downloads that still need craft and discipline to shape into something real.

And then the host shares her own story — how she tried to force her project into being a film, it kept failing, and only when she surrendered it and let go did it find its true form as a podcast. The thing she was white-knuckling? It needed her to get out of her own way.

But the line that hit me the hardest:

The opposite of anxiety is creation.

I sat with that for a while. And then I looked backward at my own life. The times I've felt the worst — the most apathetic, the most stuck, the most anxious — were the times I wasn't creating anything. I was just going through the motions. Consuming. Reacting. Existing, but not really living.

And the times I've felt the most alive? I was making something. Writing. Building. Putting something into the world that wasn't there before.

Maybe ideas really are alive. Maybe they really do choose us. But they can't choose you if you're too busy consuming everyone else's stuff to hear the knock at the door.

That's one of the reasons I love the exercise of putting out this newsletter every single morning. It forces me to get my brain going. Forces me to create. Forces me to sit with my own thoughts and actually form them into something.

It's not always easy. Some mornings I stare at the screen and wonder what the hell I'm going to write about. But that friction? That's the point. That's the muscle working. That's me keeping the antenna up.

Here's what I think most of us don't do enough: we don't diagnose our own lives.

When you have a stomach ache, you reflect. What did I eat? What did I do differently? You troubleshoot. You course-correct.

But do we do that with our actual lives?

Am I stirred every day — or am I just going through the patterns? Is there something that makes me feel alive? Or am I just a creature of comfort, running the same loop on autopilot?

Those are uncomfortable questions. Most people don't ask them because the answers might require change. And change is hard. Change means admitting that the thing you've been doing isn't working. That the routine you built isn't serving you anymore.

But you can't know what you like if you don't try things. You can't know what lights you up if you never step outside the familiar. You can't grow if you never sit in the discomfort of not knowing what comes next.

I'm working on this in my own life right now. Actively.

I picked up Carl Jung's Psychology of Yoga and Meditation at the Locust Grove book sale a few weeks ago. Because I'm trying to figure out how to slow myself down. Not in a lazy way — in a deliberate way. Because I've noticed that when I slow down, I come up with better ideas. Ideas I actually get to bring to people.

There's a line in the book that stopped me cold:

"The ancients were well aware that to heal the soul, or even the body, a certain assistance from psychic experience was necessary."

The ancients knew this. Jung knew this. The Telepathy Tapes are saying the same thing in modern language. Creation — real creation, the kind that comes from sitting with yourself — isn't just a nice hobby. It's medicine. It's how you heal. It's how you stay alive inside, not just alive on paper.

And here's the thing about slowing down — it lets you refine. You have a thought. You sit with it. You bring it to someone. They validate it or push back. You refine it. Bring it to someone else. Refine it again. And by the time you put it out into the world, it's sharper than anything you could've produced while running at full speed with your head down.

That process? That is creation. It's not just the final product. It's the sitting, the thinking, the conversation, the revision. That's the work most people skip because it feels like doing nothing. But it's everything.

I'm not telling you to quit your job and become a painter. I'm saying — try something.

Write something nobody will ever read. Cook a meal you've never made. Pick up a guitar. Start a journal. Build something with your hands. Take a different route to work and see what you notice.

The bar isn't perfection. The bar is participation.

Because here's the thing — you're either creating your life or you're consuming someone else's version of it. And consuming is easy. It's comfortable. It fills the time. But it doesn't fill you.

Creation does.

It doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to be public. It just has to be yours.

So I'll ask you again: when's the last time you created something?

If you can't remember, that's your answer. And today's a great day to change that.

Go make something. I'll be here tomorrow morning doing the same.

Warmly,

Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

PS: Hit reply and tell me — what's the last thing you created? I genuinely want to know. Even if it's small. Especially if it's small. Take Off Your Cool.